The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-12-24
AN OLD MAGAZINE.
London Illustrated News.

| London Illustrated NeW6.
 To great number of readers there is no literature so attractive as the monthly review or magazine; and there is none that is more ephemeral. How eagerly the latest number ot BLdcksoood or the Contemporary is seized upon! but let that number grow year or two old, and it is for gotten like dream or the speech of an Irish agitator. In one of Thacke- rays charming letters to Mrs. Brook field, he writes sympathetically of the indifference with which people walk through exhibitions of pictures, giv- ing nasty glance at works on which the artists may have spent months of labor and set all their hopes and am- bition. The ordinary magazine writer is doomed to still speedier oblivion than the second rate painter. If am- bilious and hopeful, as all youthful writers are, he looks probably for some fame from his essay, and has to be satisfied with check. Well, even check has been known to yield some degree of consolation.
 | OlAty -oOfCA J Cdio dSO d ICW Etd&d- zine appeared, which has some inter- est for us still, since several associa- tions are linked with it. It was called the London Mdgaztne, and was edited by MT. John Scott, who came to an untimely end year later. Of his tragic death something more shall bc said presently. Meanwhile, 1 may observe that some of the best articles in the first volume are from his pen, and that he managed to gather round him host of distinguished contribu- tors. He it was who wrote a paper on the Scotch novels before Sir Wal ter Scott had acknowledged the authorship, which may we'll put to shame Carlyle's later, and infinitely less just, estimate of the greatest Scotchmen he it was who pointed out the merits of Keats when the Quarterly and Blackpood had com bined to sheer at him; and he showed how thoroughly he could appreciate Wordsworth, despite the solemn yer dict passed against that poet by the Edinburg Reviewers.
 The London Magazine had many contributors whose names are familiar to all readers. De Quincey's "Con- tessions of an Opium Eater" appeared in its columns; Thomas Hood printed in it some we'll known poems Savage Landor sent the editor one of his "Conversations;" Hartley Coleridge sent poems so also did Keats, and the rural poet, John Clare. Carlyle's pen was also at work for the London, but the most notable contributions to it's pages are the Essays of Ella" Lamb appears to have been introduced to the editor by Hazlitt; it will be seen therefore, that the magazine se- cured, if we except Coleridge, the two finest critics of the day. Lamb, we are told by Proctor, who was himself a contributor, received two or three times the amount of tho other writers. It is interesting to turn over the pages of the old periodical and come upon so much that is familiar to us still. We wonder whether the first readers of those incomparable papers, "The Dream Children" "The Praise of Chimney Sweepers," "Mrs. Battles Opinions on Whist" and "Grace Be- fore Meat," were struck by surprise at the discovery of a great humorist and the finest of English essayists? One reader, at least, seems to have appre- ciated "Elia" after fashion, for there is, in the fourth volume, a long poem addressed to him, which ends with the assurance that he will meet his Alice again in another world
 woman still, though pure from mortal And warm as love, though blushing all of heaven.
 In the first quarter of the century the managers of some still deservedly famous periodicals indulged in per sonalities of the grossest kind, and took the names of we'll known people in vain with a recklessness that is now confined to the stump-orators of Ire land. B!ackcood, then in its first youth, was one of its chief offenders ]; and Scott, in three very powerful and daring papers, denounced "Maga" and fell foul of Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott's son-in-law, as one of the edi- tors. An explanation was demanded, and in the introduction to the maga- zine of February, 1921, Scott makes 6 full statement of the case for the ben- eft of his readers. He required that be- fore giving Lockhart "satisfaction" he